Starmer leaves office with Labour divided over Gaza

Keir Starmer is set to leave office after announcing his resignation on Monday, ending a premiership marked by collapsing public support, internal party discipline battles and deep anger over his handling of Gaza.

His departure follows months of pressure inside Labour and a bruising set of local election results in which the party suffered heavy losses while Reform UK made major gains. Labour lost 1,496 council seats and control of 38 councils in the 2026 local elections, while Reform UK gained 1,451 seats and emerged as the major beneficiary of public discontent.  

Starmer’s resignation confirmed the fragility of the mandate he won in 2024. Labour secured a landslide majority in Parliament, but did so with only around a third of the vote. The result was made possible by the collapse of the Conservative vote and the split on the right created by Reform. 

Labour’s vote share under Starmer was also lower than Jeremy Corbyn’s in both 2017 and 2019, even though Starmer won a far larger parliamentary majority. Critics argued at the time that Labour’s victory reflected the distortions of the first-past-the-post system as much as public enthusiasm for its leader.

For many on the Labour left, that episode confirmed a wider pattern. Starmer had presented himself as a unity candidate when he ran for the Labour leadership, but his leadership became associated with strict party discipline, abandoned pledges and the exclusion of left-wing figures. Jeremy Corbyn was blocked from standing again as a Labour candidate, while other left-wing MPs and candidates faced suspension, deselection or removal from the party machine.

Starmer’s critics also point to the scale of suspensions under his leadership, arguing that party discipline became a central tool for remaking Labour and marginalising the left. The use of the whip, the removal of candidates and the treatment of dissenting MPs helped create a party that was electorally successful in 2024 but increasingly hollowed out ideologically. 

Gaza intensified that rupture. After 7 October, 2023, Starmer repeatedly defended Israel’s “right to defend itself”. In an LBC interview, when asked whether Israel had the right to cut off power and water to Gaza, he said: “I think that Israel does have that right.” He later insisted that his comments had been misunderstood and Labour said his answer had referred to Israel’s right to self-defence, not to cutting off basic supplies. However, the remarks caused deep anger among Palestinians, British Muslims and many Labour members.  

For months, Labour resisted calls for an immediate ceasefire, instead backing “humanitarian pauses”. Critics argued that this language failed to confront the scale of Israel’s assault and risked giving political cover to forced displacement in Gaza. When MPs voted in November 2023 on a motion calling for an immediate ceasefire, Starmer ordered Labour MPs not to support it. Ten frontbenchers either resigned or were removed after backing the motion. The episode became one of the clearest signs that Gaza had become a test of loyalty inside Starmer’s Labour.

READ: Over 300 Muslim councillors demand UK’s Labour Party to call for ceasefire in Gaza

Labour’s position shifted gradually. In December 2023, after then Foreign Secretary David Cameron wrote in favour of a “sustainable ceasefire” while stopping short of an immediate ceasefire, Labour adopted similar language. By February 2024, following pressure from Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar and others, Starmer backed an immediate ceasefire in principle. Yet critics argued that Labour’s wording still left room for Israel to continue military operations.

That dispute came to a head on 21 February, 2024, when the Scottish National Party tabled a Commons motion calling for an immediate ceasefire and an end to collective punishment in Gaza. Labour put forward its own amendment, which called for an immediate humanitarian ceasefire but added conditions, including language stating that Israel could not be expected to stop fighting if Hamas continued violence. Critics said the amendment allowed Labour to appear supportive of an immediate ceasefire while weakening the demand.  

The Speaker, Lindsay Hoyle, selected Labour’s amendment in a controversial break with convention, triggering a parliamentary row and walkouts by Conservative and SNP MPs. Hoyle later apologised to MPs for the handling of the vote, saying he had acted out of concern for MPs’ safety. For Starmer, the amendment helped avoid a larger rebellion. For his critics, it showed how procedural manoeuvring was used to contain dissent over Gaza.

The Fire Brigades Union said MPs should have backed the SNP motion as the only one calling for an immediate ceasefire “without caveats”. Momentum described Labour’s amendment as “conditional and caveated”. The episode received far less sustained media scrutiny than many other parliamentary controversies, a silence that critics say reflected the wider failure of British public debate to treat Palestinian deaths with the same urgency afforded to other conflicts.

The controversy over Gaza cannot be separated from the internal politics of Labour under Starmer. Labour Together, the factional organisation closely associated with Morgan McSweeney, Starmer’s former chief of staff, played a major role in the party’s transformation after the Corbyn years. The group was fined by the Electoral Commission in 2021 for failing to properly report donations. The Commission found offences including failure to deliver donation reports within 30 days and inaccurate reporting of a donation.